The antipathy between Robert De Niro and Donald Trump is one of the more enjoyable non-hip-hop-related celebrity beefs of our time. It’s a war of words that has given us such hits as De Niro calling Trump “jerkoff-in-chief” at the National Board of Review awards, as well as this response to De Niro banning Trump from his Nobu chain of sushi restaurants, a perfect distillation of the tendency among the right to regard an incurious nature as some sort of twisted badge of kneejerk anti-intellectual honor:
Anyway, De Niro has been talking so much shit about Trump—enough that you can almost forget his flirtation with anti-vaxxing—that he’s whittled his argument down to the basics, taking the stage at last night’s Tony Awards ostensibly to introduce Bruce Springsteen, but also to provide his most concise statement on the topic yet, via Variety: